World News 3.12.16

• NORTH KOREA: North Korea sub missing amid US-South Korea exercises (BBC News)
• INDIA: Country sees its first openly-gay prince (Huffington Post)
• PAKISTAN: Powerful religious body declares state law criminalizing violence against women is "un-Islamic" (Reuters) 
• BRAZIL: drug kingpin killed by Zika virus (Daily Mirror)
• SCOTLAND: Strange lights fill the night sky above Perthshire (Huffington Post)
• AUSTRALIA: Polls find Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, and British support for a EU-style system of free movement among countries (ABC News)

Aristotelian Analysis: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Here is the prompt for Thursday's in-class essay:

Award-winning investigative journalist, Katherine Boo, has been tackling issues of poverty for some 20 years. Her Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, which won the 2012 National Book Award for Nonfiction, chronicles the often desperate struggle to survive in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi. Boo achieved this by embedding herself in the makeshift community for three years. She says, “I generally find issues of poverty, opportunity, and global development to be over-theorized and under-reported. And it seemed to me that in India, as in the US, some of the experts most ready to describe how lower-income people are faring weren’t spending much time with those people.” Ultimately, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is an indictment of a society willing to hide away its most vulnerable in favor of affluence and progress. Use one of Aristotle’s Modes of Persuasion—logos, pathos, or ethos—to analyze the book’s central argument. Specifically, how does Boo persuade her readers of the injustices of a place like Annawadi using an appeal to either logic, emotion, or authority? Cite exclusively from Behind the Beautiful Forevers to support your thesis.

Reflection 4: This is How We Do It—Sex Education Here and Abroad

Speaking to a United Nations AIDS conference in 1994, then-US Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders suggested that masturbation was "part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." After a quick public outcry, she was fired by President Clinton. Over 20 years later, masturbation is only one of many topics that remain taboo in the sex education classes of America. Today, fights rage over everything from abstinence-only programs to the presence of contraceptives on campuses; even the mere mentions of abortion and homosexuality are hotly debated. While some Americans favor sex education based on current sexual health information, others insist on abstinence-based approaches—if at all. Thus, sex education here varies widely from state to state, even county to county. But what of the rest of the world? What are some of the approaches countries are taking to teach (or not teach) their citizens about sexual health? What issues are other countries tackling that aren't mentioned in the American national dialogue. Finally, what do you like or not like about how sex education is taught around the world? What, if anything, should we adopt in this country?

Include at least two of the following pieces in your discussion:

• "Sex Education" (Last Week with John Oliver)
• "Swedish Sex Education has Time for Games and Mature Debate" (Guardian)
• "Do Chinese Classrooms Need to Talk About Sex?" (CNN)
• "What About Sex Education in the Arab World?" (Morocco World News)
• "Maybe We Should Outsource Our Sex Education to Mexico" (AlterNet) 
• "No Sex Education, Please, We're Italian" (EuropeanVoice)

Requirements:

• MLA Style
• 1.5 pages in length
• Works cited page

Due: Th 04.17

Week 7: Germany

The Victory Column, Berlin

Week 7: Germany
Tu 3.8/Th 3.10
Read: FOREVERS—Part 4: Up and Out
Class: ARISTOTELIAN ANALYSIS; Reading Discussion; Multimedia presentations

Upcoming:

Week 8: South Korea
Tu 3.15/Th 3.17
Read: TBA
Class: Reading Discussion; Multimedia presentations; Watch—“Migrants Stranded on Kos: Europe or Die” (Vice), Lecture—“Toward a Consensus: The Rogerian Argument”
Due: REFLECTION 4